Medical History最新文献

This essay aims to situate the emergence of Siddha medicine as a separate medical system in the erstwhile Madras Presidency of colonial India within a broader socio-economic context. Scholars who have worked on Siddha medicine have stressed more on political dimensions like nationalism and sub-nationalism with inadequate attention to the interplay of various (other) factors including contemporary global developments, changes in the attitude of the colonial State and especially to the new promises held by the greater deference shown to indigenous medical systems from the 1920s. If the construction of 'national medicine' based on the Sanskrit texts and the accompanying marginalisation of regional texts and practices were the only reasons for the emergence of Siddha medicine as presented by scholars, it leaves open the question as to why this emergence happened only during the third decade of the twentieth century, though the marginalisation processes started during the first decade itself. This paper seeks to find an answer by analysing the formation of Siddha medical identity beyond the frameworks of nationalism and sub-nationalism. Further, it explicates how material factors served as immediate cause along with the other, and more ideational factors related to the rise of the Dravidian political and cultural movement.

Our contributions examine the Norwegian Karl Evang's (1901-1981) and the Dane Halfdan Mahler's (1923-2016) participation in international health co-operation facilitated by the World Health Organization (WHO) in India in the 1950s. While Evang's was a hectic, but relatively short visit as part of a WHO visiting team of medical scientists in 1953, Mahler's spanned the entire decade on assignments as WHO medical officer to tuberculosis control projects. Mahler's name should be familiar to researchers of international health as the Director-General of the WHO 1973-88, and for his promotion of primary health care through the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration. Evang, Norway's Director of Health 1938-72, was also a key figure in international health in the mid-twentieth century as one of the original instigators of the WHO, and a participant in much of its early work.A core theme is the place of social medicine, both in Evang's and Mahler's work, and within the WHO and its navigation of complex postcolonial settings in the 1950s. Investigating cross-regional encounters and circulations of social medicine ideas between Evang and Mahler and their Indian interlocutors as well as international WHO staff members, we ask what the role of social medicine was in international health in the early post-war period. Researchers have found that social medicine had its heyday during the 1930s and 1940s, and that a technology-focused, vertical approach became dominant soon after the war. In contrast, we suggest that continued circulation of social medical ideas points towards a more complicated picture.

Intermittent fever is a historical diagnosis with a contested meaning. Historians have associated it with both benign malaria and severe epidemics during the Early Modern Era and early nineteenth century. Where other older medical diagnoses perished under changing medical paradigms, intermittent fever 'survived' into the twentieth century. This article studies the development in how intermittent fever was framed in Denmark between 1826 and 1886 through terminology, clinical symptoms and aetiology. In the 1820s and 1830s, intermittent fever was a broad disease category, which the diagnosis 'koldfeber'. Danish physicians were inspired by Hippocratic teachings in the early nineteenth century, and patients were seen as having unique constitutions. For that reason, intermittent fevers presented itself as both benign and severe with a broad spectrum of clinical symptoms. As the Parisian school gradually replaced humoral pathology in the mid-nineteenth century, intermittent fever and koldfeber became synonymous for one disease condition with a nosography that resembles modern malaria. The nosography of intermittent fever remained consistent throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Although intermittent fever was conceptualized as caused by miasmas throughout most of the nineteenth century, the discovery of the Plasmodium parasite in 1880 led to a change in the conceptualization of what miasmas were. The article concludes that the development of how intermittent fever was framed follows the changing scientific paradigms that shaped Danish medicine in the nineteenth century.

This article examines the presence and influence of the work of Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger and existential analysis (Daseinsanalyse) in Spanish psychiatry in the central decades of the 20th century. First, and drawing on various printed and archival sources, it reconstructs the important personal and professional ties that Binswanger maintained with numerous Spanish colleagues and describes the notable dissemination of his work in Spain through bibliographical reviews, scientific events, academic reports, university lectures and translations. Next, it reviews the incorporation of the postulates of existential analysis into the discourse of Spanish psychiatrists and assesses their most elaborate and original contributions to the foundations of 'anthropological-existential' psychiatry or the 'existential-analytical' interpretation of certain disorders or clinical conditions. And, finally, it tries to clarify the assessment according to which the (inevitable) instrumentalisation of existential analysis in the context of Franco's Spain first compromised the critical recognition of its true possibilities (and limits) and later contributed to the discrediting of psychopathological research among Spanish psychiatrists.